Road Out of Winter Read online

  * * *

  June passed. The gray sky deepened. Every morning I woke in my tiny house, telling myself I would not have to light a fire, not this morning, not this late, not in summer. But then I felt the ache from shivering all night. I felt the air, crisp as bones. I swung the quilt around my shoulders and crept down the ladder. In the dark I fed wood into the stove.

  Through the narrow window, I could see the big farmhouse on the hill, sharper than ever since the trees had no leaves. I could almost imagine a vein of blue smoke above the roof. But no smoke would come from the farmhouse chimney now unless I lit it.

  It was quiet on the farm, always, but I began to notice it more. The house and purple finches, nuthatches, cardinals, the birds that would come to the sill for breakfast crumbs—my mama knew all their names—where were they? Morning after morning I stood at the window and realized other things were gone. No woodpeckers thrummed in the trees or thudded their beaks against the house. No owls whooped like boys in the night. I still heard the coyotes, high and cold, that sweet-howl call and response that made my heart freeze, tight in my chest, both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

  But I heard no peepers. Where were the frogs? The two ponds on the property looked low and stagnant. No ducks skimmed the water’s surface. Nothing came from the sky except cold rain. Then snow.

  My livelihood, my very life, depended on summer, on warmth and sun. Lobo had left me in charge of the farm knowing I could handle it. I could water and rotate, I could keep the plants alive. I could keep my mouth shut and stick to the deal with the boy.

  But in July, it didn’t get colder, it just kept on not getting warmer, not getting better.

  It was strange to celebrate the Fourth without cookouts, Popsicles, and tank tops. I made vegetable soup to bring to Lisbeth’s house, and when the sky, which was perpetually dull and heavy like a fistful of dirty wool, darkened, her neighbors set off fireworks. Roman candles, bought across the border in West Virginia.

  Then it snowed again.

  I didn’t want to believe they could happen at the same time, fireworks and snow. The Roman candles dissipated, their sparks extinguished in the cold, wet air. Snow gathered, lacy as ash but mounting on sheds, on the roof of my truck parked in the alley between the houses and an old bar. A man poked his head out of the bar, looked at the sky, then stumbled back into the dark and pounding bass, throwing his drunken arms out for balance like an ice skater. Lisbeth’s neighbors were grilling. I heard sizzling as flakes struck the coals. This snow was going to stick.

  Lisbeth was quiet. How much longer could we do this, anyway, sit around in lawn chairs in her folks’ backyard? People our age were signing leases. If I didn’t have the farm to manage, the crop to sell, maybe she and I could do that, get an apartment together in a city, Chillicothe or Marietta. We could take sandwiches to the river where the barges battened kayaks, and fishing lines, threaded with lead weights, hung from the trees, dangling in the water like a girl’s long hair.

  Instead, here we were, watching the neighbors’ thermal underwear stiffen on a clothesline. More than ever, I felt trapped. By my family, by the plants, by Ohio.

  “Should’a brought that in,” Lisbeth’s daddy said about the laundry, taking a pull on a cold lemonade.

  * * *

  In August, people in town, when I shopped for groceries and fertilizer and diatomaceous earth, had finally stopped saying, What a ridiculous year. What an unusual year. This is one for the record books. By August, it wasn’t funny anymore. The buds never unfolded. The flowers never came.

  A letter came to everyone in the county. I opened it at the mailbox and trudged up the quarter-mile driveway back to the lower field. By the time I reached my tiny house, I had read the letter a few times.

  In response to the unprecedented cold weather our nation is experiencing, and under the advisement of a committee of parents, educators, and administrators, the school board has voted to suspend school until October 1, at which time this situation may be reassessed. We will contact you with further updates.

  The letter wasn’t a huge surprise. I remembered the high school didn’t turn on the heat until the end of October, and I doubted they could afford two extra months of heating, especially not knowing how cold it would get. The part of the letter that concerned me was the last line.

  We encourage you to spend this time with your families.

  My pocket shook. Lisbeth was calling.

  I didn’t have reception in the driveway—most of the farm didn’t—but my tiny house sat on its own hill, which caught some weak signals from the tower in town. She didn’t bother with hello. “Did you get the letter?” she asked.

  I set the rest of the mail on the shelf inside the door. “Yes.”

  “Thoughts?”

  I paused. “I don’t think you have to worry about those altos this year.”

  Lisbeth fell silent.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’ll be like a long vacation for you. We can hang out together so you won’t get bored. Why don’t you come over right now?”

  “You know I can’t do that. I can’t come out there.”

  “Come to Crossroads at least. Get your grease fix.”

  She didn’t answer, and I glanced out the window by the woodstove. The metal roof of the farmhouse looked silver in a new freckling of snow. In its basement, I knew, the lights glowed warm and white, and the air smelled like a mossy jungle, heavy and spicy and wet. Now, the basement was the only place anything could grow.

  I placed my hand above the top of the stove. It was ice-cold. “Lisbeth, I guess I should go. The fire’s out. I have to get more wood. In August.” I tried to laugh.

  Lisbeth didn’t laugh back. “Wil, wait.” She took a breath, and I knew something big was coming; she inhaled, then spoke in a rush when she delivered bad or hard news. I pictured her holding on to her braid, squeezing it, as she did for reassurance. She didn’t even know that she did this. “We’re getting out,” she said. “The Church is going away and we’re going with them. I want you to come with us. My folks want you to. The Church said it was okay.”

  “Getting out? Where are you going?”

  “South. That’s all I know.”

  The news, when I watched it at Lisbeth’s house—we didn’t have cable or internet on the farm—showed cars waiting to cross into Mexico. The line stretched for miles, longer and longer every cold day, the cars laden with suitcases, gas cans, children’s bikes. Whole lives strapped to the roofs. Most of the cars were turned away at the border. Where was Lisbeth going to go?

  “What about your job?” I said.

  She did laugh then, but it came out barking like a cough. “What job, now?”

  What about me? I thought. Us? I said, “The entire church is moving together?”

  “Yes. The Migration, that’s what they’re calling it.”

  “Like birds.”

  “Wil, you can’t tell anyone about this, okay? You can’t tell your mama or Lobo, when they call. The invitation is only for you. The Church talked about it, and that was the decision.” Silence from me, which Lisbeth felt uncomfortable with and tried to fill. “It’s just, we’re taking these vans, and there’s only so much room, so many seat belts. And there’s only so much food.”

  “You’re taking food? What place are you going to that has no food?”

  “The Church is prepared. We’ve been preparing for something for a long time. Not this specifically, but in case something should come, someday, we’ve been ready. My parents love you,” Lisbeth said. “I love you. Come with us. We can protect you.”

  “Protect me from what? Do you know something? What’s causing this?”

  Lisbeth paused. “God.”

  2

  The day she left, the vans filled the road, one after the other. It was like the news stories about the Mexican border, except these vans were
identical white, their windows tinted. I knew Lisbeth rode in one of them. Even though I didn’t want to, even though I hated The Church for taking my closest friend from me, the only one who knew me, the one I loved, I stood out beside the road, in the wild field at the end of our driveway, beside the rural route, and waved at every single one.

  Nobody had thought much about The Church until they had moved from the basement of the community center into the abandoned supermarket at the edge of town. Somehow they had enough money to buy the building and fix it up, and somehow they had enough people to fill it every Sunday and Wednesday.

  In the holler, we tended to leave things alone as long as you weren’t hurting anybody—and even then, as Lobo liked to joke, there was a sliding scale. Was it your own kin you were hurting? Were they grown up? Had they brought it on themselves, bought the pills, boiled the poppies, kissed your wife or sister?

  People were least likely to forgive hurting a dog, Lobo said. That was worse than hurting a woman. If you had land, had bought it or inherited it and held on to it, you could do what you wanted out there, beyond your driveway gate or locked doors. That was your right.

  Nobody had thought much about The Church. Except their members kept writing letters to the editor of the newspaper, and they kept having candidates run for school board—and win. They became a part of the town, like a shadow quietly and swiftly spreading over us. Or a disease.

  And now they were gone. All gone somewhere. All the white church vans.

  The Migration.

  I thought I would know which van she was in. I thought she would roll down the window, or I would see her moving behind the dark glass. She would give me a sign—and I would know her. But she didn’t. The last van passed me.

  * * *

  The leaves on the trees were supposed to redden and brown, to die and fall. But there were no leaves on the trees. We were supposed to start wearing sweaters as the cold nights stretched on. But we were already wearing sweaters. So we added layers, those of us who could afford more wool and fleece. The charity shop ran out of coats. The Church wasn’t there to launch a warm-clothing drive. School wasn’t open to feed children hot breakfast and lunch. It was harvest time, supposed to be. The moon looked silver and swollen, and the coyotes howled at night with a sharpness I knew was hunger.

  Weed needs a warm, humid climate. Always before, that was what we had in southeastern Ohio; that was our gift. One of the only things that grew well in our old, abused soil, the earth mistreated by years of coal mining and fracking and mountaintop removal, was marijuana. That was what Lobo said.

  But the outdoor harvest the year that Lobo and Mama decided to leave had been a bad one. A wet spring, if you could call it spring at all. Lobo and Mama had lost their plants that they grew in the wild: in neglected lots, in deep forest, in patches of unused land behind highways, in woody acres belonging to the state or accessible only by canoe.

  Some of the plants that Lobo had hiked in on a pack and planted at twilight in the illegal ground had been swept away by rain. Other plants never took. The earth was too wet and chilled. Their roots rotted. Still other plants froze: their leaves folding, blackening, then falling off. Or they were eaten young by desperate animals or the always-desperate insects. Every time Lobo went out in a canoe to check on the wild plants, he returned with his head a little lower, his back more dejected, his jaw tight. I knew he would chew his food silently and angrily, lash out at Mama, kick something down the stairs. I didn’t go up to the farmhouse for dinner on those nights. I didn’t want to be the thing he kicked.

  Outdoor crops were half our income. But after the first cold year, after the loss of everything wild, we didn’t even try to plant outside. All we had left was the grow room in the basement of the big house.

  As a teenager, I had avoided going in there. It hurt my eyes. I felt it would stick on me, like the scent of weed, be obvious. I thought—like sex—once I had been down in the grow room, people would know. And they did know, but for other reasons: it was a small town. There were rumors that were true; people bought from Lobo and knew his girlfriend had a daughter. Our weed was good. People came across state lines to buy it. And they talked about it, about us.

  Lisbeth and I became fast friends because I was an outcast and she was a Church weirdo. She had a list of forbidden things, and she obeyed it, at first. She would talk to me without asking, like other kids did, Do you have any on you? Is it true, what they say, that yours is as sweet as strawberry?

  What I felt, going in the grow room, was trouble trouble trouble beaming at me from the walls. Bright lights were suspended from the ceiling. The light bounced off the walls, which were covered in silver insulation, nail-gunned into place, on every side of the room, even the ceiling, to keep in the heat and light. The fans ran daily, ventilating the space. The air was fecund, a lushness you could feel. Someone had to move the plants, heavy in their plastic pots of earth, every day, switching out the plants under the lamps, and the ones closest to the fans, rotating so that every leaf got the same amount of light and warmth, every plant had a chance.

  Someone—usually me—had to do the other work of keeping the farm running while the basement hummed on. The daily maintenance, the chores and the crises: always keeping the wild back, keeping the farm from teetering into decay, the weeds pushing at the door of the house like hungry children. I was always beating back nature, bending it into working for me, ripping out the multiflora rose thorns, hacking and burning hemlock, spraying aphids off the pot.

  The summer chores were difficult. But winter was dire, made up of essential tasks necessary just to survive. And now winter was everywhere. Winter was always. Winter was the fire, the fire, the fire—keeping the stoves going and the water running, which meant remembering to leave the taps on a trickle at night and sometimes hiking up to the cistern and either chopping at the ice crust on top, or running a hairdryer on the pipes closest to the surface if they froze. Or, if I couldn’t unfreeze the pipes and it was biting cold, lugging buckets of fresh water from the cistern back to the house.

  But the fire. The fire needed to be fed always, and with Lobo and Mama busy in the grow room—turning the plants, picking bugs off the plants, trimming the leaves from the plants—the fire fell to me.

  Soon it all did, all the work. Lobo knew somebody in California. The man had a house and fields, needed a grower. After the first cold year, the year the outdoor harvest died, the first time we skipped spring, Lobo and Mama went on ahead to check it out. They left me alone with the farm.

  * * *

  I burned more fuel than I ever had before. Usually we would start in July, chopping wood for the coming winter. It was strange to think about cold when the sun was high and bright, when sweat pasted my hair to the back of my neck, and we drained iced nettle tea in jars. But that was the way of the work: to plan ahead, to be ready. What was coming would eventually come. Chopping a few days a week, a few hours a day, no more, we would have a decent supply of wood by October’s first frosts.

  But now I couldn’t chop fast enough. I was neglecting my chores in the grow room. Meanwhile, the woodpile sank low. Mice scuttled into the house to keep warm. The farm was too much for anyone to manage alone, I thought as I shoved my ax into the truck. I needed more wood again.

  I could take Lobo’s old truck anywhere, it didn’t matter: into the mud, off the road. We would drive it till it died, and leave it where it lay, probably at the bottom of a hill somewhere or in a timothy field, the rusting red hulk of a whale. There was a cutout through the lower field that led into the trees, which the neighbors used for hunting. I drove the truck there to find wood.

  The deer were leaving. We had hunted them, we had hunted them a lot. We had finally, when spring didn’t come this year, panicked, and went after them with a desperation that knew no season.

  People had always poached in the woods. But parking the truck and stepping out into the forest, I
saw smaller skulls than I had ever seen before. Deer bones jutted out of the leaves. Does, which were good eating.

  But maybe some fawns, too.

  I didn’t wander too far from the truck; I wouldn’t be able to carry the wood. In the cold weather, in the bulky coveralls and coat I wore all the time now, hair stuffed up in my hat, not much marked me as female. But not much marked me as adult, either. I was small, a head shorter than Lisbeth and most of the women in the holler. I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be, as Lobo always thought I should be. Runt, he called me. The weakling that came with the real woman he wanted. Good for nothing, he would say. He had told me I had to learn to defend myself. Because of the way I looked, because of who I was, men would come after me.

  He was right about some things.

  I found a decent tree, a dead sugar maple. I would chop it in the woods, heft the pieces into the bed, drive home, and split it. The work would take all morning, maybe all day, and it was harder, more demanding work than sitting at a table and snipping buds off plants. My back would ache in different places tonight.

  But the good thing about chopping wood, your mind wasn’t bothered by anything. I could forget missing Lisbeth, missing Mama. What they were doing in California, why she hadn’t called for months—he hadn’t let her—even the missed spring, I put it out of my mind. It was just me and the ax.

  It felt good not thinking, listening to the ax’s song. I got warm for a moment. But I heard something. I stopped, buried the ax in the log. I heard a voice calling, not birdsong.

  Mama.

  That was my first thought. A voice, calling in the woods. What else do you call for?

  “Hello?” I stepped off the cow path, let my eyes rove the landscape: hills, speckled with dead leaves, a little snow clustered in feathery patches.